


Side Notes on Two Random Olympians

by cavaliere_azzurro



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Hiding in Plain Sight, Idiots in Love, Platonic Romance, Platonic business partners, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmates, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 02:00:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14274480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cavaliere_azzurro/pseuds/cavaliere_azzurro
Summary: Have you ever wondered whether or not Tessa and Scott are a topic of discussion in the circuit?And if so, what their teammates, their friends and family, sometimes even themselves or total strangers, would have to say about, or directly to, them?Have you ever wondered how many conversations about these two might have taken place at the last Olympics, with no camera capturing them?If the answer is yes, you’ve (hopefully) come to the right place.





	Side Notes on Two Random Olympians

**Author's Note:**

> First of all - thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the enthusiastic response to my first work! I didn't expect so many people to read it, let alone like it. So, thank you to everyone who took the time to read, leave kudos, review, and/or bookmark it! You made my day :-)  
> Secondly - it turns out I can't get out of this bottomless pit. I can't find a way to get rid of these two other than writing some of the nonsense that's been twirling around my head for some time now, so here I am again. The initial idea for this was different, but I hope you'll like how it turned out. I wanted to try and step up my game a notch, but I might have chewed more than I could bite instead. Reviews are more than welcomed!  
> Everything in here is fictional.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What goes on when the lights are still off on the Olympics.

_Prologue_

Have you ever had the deep, almost erotic pleasure of rifling through unwanted books at a flea market until you find _the one_? You open it and notice it’s covered in scribbled notes; and that, far from discouraging you from buying it, only increases its lure in your eyes. You take it home, make yourself comfortable on your favorite armchair, with a mug of hot chocolate for good measure, and set to reading.  
You _know_ what you should pay attention to is the actual text, but your mind keeps drifting to the flood of side notes the previous owner scribbled all over the pages. You itch to know what someone else was thinking about while they were reading this same book you’re now holding; you want to catch a glimpse of someone else’s train of thought, and that will to feel a connection with a real, living human being – not with a long dead or otherwise distant author – is so strong at some point you give up following the printed story and dive head first into all those extraneous, at times preposterous bits and pieces of another point of view.  
The line between what actually happens and what someone else thinks happens blurs, and you’re presented with a choice – believe those side notes, or not. Follow the frantic advice “ _Don’t go past this point if Dumbledore is your favorite character!_ ” or blatantly ignore it and go on to find out he dies and was as manipulative as Voldemort all along, although for different reasons. Believe the devastated scribble “ _Sam dies_ ” and have your heart shattered for the following ten hundreds pages only to find out it was a dreadful lie, or distrust it and go on to find out it all ends well.  
Or, you can dodge the issue altogether, and read everything just for the pleasure of it.  


This is what the story of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir was like for me.  
A book I unwittingly started reading the day I heard the most delicate description of ice dancing ever, and that had me hooked from the first page. A book I read hopping from the words printed in black and white – their own words – to the copious amount of side notes its every page was covered in, and back. Notes left by strangers, by their teammates, their friends, their family, sometimes even by themselves; side notes that created a story within a story – the story of Tessa and Scott, of Virtue and Moir, seen from multiple points of view and through many different conversations, with or about them, some of which I myself heard around the rink.  
Side notes and words that extensively cover the entire 2018 Winter Olympic Games and go further back in time with no order or structure whatsoever. A story I gave up trying to tell the truth apart from the lies in – the absolute truth doesn’t exist anyway, so why bother?

Some pages were already well-worn when I got hold of this book, and my handling it with obsessive dedication for the past couple of months certainly didn’t help; I can see some of them are starting to tear apart, and the ink has already disappeared in some points. So I suppose now it’s as good a time as any to put modern-day technology to good use and move everything to a more enduring support using a good OCR tool, or a word processor, or both.  
And, since I found this very interesting website, I suppose I might as well share it with you, who probably didn’t have the luck to stumble upon such a scribbled-over copy of it and therefore missed all the anecdotes and snippets and bits from the past Olympic Games that I found recorded in there. Maybe I added some more notes, maybe I didn’t. Maybe I made up the entire story, maybe I didn’t. Maybe there’s no book at all and I’m just messing with you.  
You make with it whatever you will. Just know that you can trust me. I’m a reliable source.

* * *

_Chapter One_

I’ll be honest with you; I had never heard about Virtue and Moir before the last Olympics.  
It may sound strange, considering that the people I hang out with (and I myself) are all, in some way or another, connected to this or that winter sport; and yet, none of them had ever mentioned someone named like that to me.  
There’s a good chance this is to ascribe to the fact that I’m, essentially, a loner. I enjoy company, I really do, but big groups of people make me so uneasy my body temperature spikes up and I feel like every part of me is burning. So I rather keep to myself, hanging out occasionally with only a few people at a time – and by _a few_ , I mean one or two, tops. Most of the times, I end up being the third wheel to one couple or another.  
Even then – when I feel up to being around people –, I’m one of very few words. I mostly just listen, speaking up for myself only when someone really grates on my nerves – which, I have to say, doesn’t happen often, ‘cause the bunch of people I hang out with _gets_ me. They have me down cold, and know how not to push my buttons.

Luckily for me, my job seldom requires me to interact with people on a regular basis. I have what could only be described as a key role in my field – winter sports –, but I’m fortunate enough that my assignment is one I can largely carry out in the background.  
Since I hold such a fundamental position – and believe me, I for one am still amazed by this; I would’ve never thought I’d ever be more than a nameless worker bee in a million, so to speak –, I was recruited to be part of the Winter Olympics’ technical personnel only a few hours after South Korea had been drawn as hosting country for the next Games.  
Being part of the technical crew – the core piece that allows the event to take place and to run smoothly, the one everyone always forgets about – meant I was involved in making the Olympic dream come true long before the Games officially started. I quickly got settled in Peyongchang (all the expenses were covered by the organizing committee), and I set myself to work.  
You wouldn’t believe how much effort it took us; months of planning and preparing and checking and double-checking. A double-check was exactly what my team had in schedule that day in early February when I first heard about Virtue and Moir. 

When I came in to work that morning (here’s another thing I can tell you about me – my job required me to work in the ice arena day in and day out. So that’s where everything I’m about to recount takes place), the activity around the place was hectic. It didn’t surprise me, since the Games were quickly approaching and there were still a lot of things to arrange and supervise.  
I took notice of two Korean women going through the bleachers, making sure every seat had an assigned number. As they started checking the bottom row, the one closer to the rink, their voices carried through to me and, thanks to the few months I had spent in South Korea that had compelled me to learn at least a little bit of the language, I was able to grasp about half of their conversation.

“– as delicate as snowflakes.”  
“Let us hope they don’t fall, as snowflakes do, on the cold ice.”  
“...”  
“Their shining silvery blades will weave the reddest of flowers, the most beautiful of roses –”  
“– this rink, like butterflies graze the petals of flowers in their graceful flying?”  
“On the 11th and 12th of this snowy month, and then again –”  
“...”  
“– he’ll hold her hand as if she were the toughest and most fragile crystal sculpture, and she’ll look into his eyes as if they were her northern stars –”  
“...”  
“May they do well.”

Now – I may come off as cold and hard, but I’m actually a big softie inside. So, as I listened to these two talk about (apparently) a pair of ice skaters in such a poetic manner – fitting to a language as inherently poetic as Korean –, I envisioned a rarefied perfection of faint gestures and ghostly touches, a dance of planet and stars within the space of an ice rink; and I knew I was sold.  
That day, after work let out, I set myself to try and find out who those two were. That part about the reddest of flowers, and their eyes getting lost into each other’s… I was intrigued. I wanted to see them for myself. I wanted to see their emotions play out, and maybe learn a thing or two about that unknown, awkward thing – _feelings_ – I seemed to be so uncomfortable with. 

* * *

A couple days later, I hadn’t found out who the skaters the two had been talking about were yet.  
Probably due to my extremely demure nature, that has always kept me away from gossip and rumors, the only thing I had acquired a knowledge about up until then was ice skating, plain and simple. I have always had a knack for hard facts and data; I could dissect a four-minute skate into its smallest details and describe each and every stance down to the toe pick, but that was just about it. I blissfully ignored the existence of that full-fledged subbranch of ice skating known as _study of pairs_ – until I didn’t.  
The study of pairs, once you get the gist of it, is quite simple. It is based on two yes-and-no questions, one of which – 1) does a pair do jumps and throws? If yes, it’s a _pair_ ; if not, it’s an _ice dancing pair_ – is purely formal, while the core information is attained with 2) is the pair also _together_ together? If yes, it’s a _couple_ ; if not, it’s just _business partners_.  
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Right as rain. Just a yes/no question.  
No in-between answers, no gray area.  
Not at all. 

There is, however, a small flaw – you can’t ask the _real_ question directly to the persons concerned.  
So, what you’re left with is – there’s no foolproof way to know whether or not two people skating together are also _together_ together; and yet, you so desperately want to _know_. If you were asked _why_ it is that you feel the need to put a label on a relationship you’re not even a part of, you’d say, _I don’t know why I care, but I do. I don’t necessarily want to know if they have sex with each other or not. I just need to know they_ love _each other, as in_ they’re madly in love with each other and – stuff.  
I assume that, since you’re wandering around here, you probably are a nice and caring person – a harmless fan who roots for their favorite on-ice pair to be an off-ice pair too, who secretly (well, maybe not so secretly) wishes them to be head over heels in love, who thinks love is a bond between two souls, or better yet, one soul split in two – their two – bodies.  
Unfortunately, not everyone is like you. To give you an effective instance of that, let me recall a conversation I had the misfortune of overhearing three days before the Games began. 

“Man, we’re gonna get to watch that steamy _Moulin Rouge_ thing live.”  
“Can’t wait – heard it’s hot as hell.”  
“The woman certainly is.”  
“If I were her partner, I’d have had my way with her a long time ago.”  
“If she _let_ you have your way with her.”  
“Let – man, she’s a _woman_. I’d have my way with her whether or not she wanted me to.”  
“D’ you think they’re fucking?”  
“Damn, if he’s not fucking her yet, he’s a fucking faggot. I’ve seen that Latin crap of hers once – wife bribed me into watching ice dance.”  
“Faggot.”  
“Gave me a thorough blowjob. I tell you, worth it. And she’s got this dress – it just screams _fuck me_.”  
At this point, I heard wolf whistles.  
“Man – that’s take-me-hard-here-and-now plain and simple. Lemme see that Latin thing.”  
The whistles got louder.  
“She got me off right there.”  
“You mean your wife did.”  
“No _way_ , man. Wife’s not as tasty as that fucking doll, y’ know?” 

Those three lighting operators who were checking the lights in the ice arena made me realize a terrifying thing about mankind – that if something (a relationship, for example) is _(way)_ too complex for your reasoning, it has to be shrunk and trimmed until it fits; and that, plain and simple, there are men who can’t understand any dynamic between a man and a woman other than that of sexual objectification and animal-like greediness.  
Something interesting came out of this unfortunate exchange, anyway; I now knew one of the ice dancing pairs’ routine would consist of _Moulin Rouge_ and some _Latin_. I decided to watch out for them too. Could they be the same ones the Korean women had been talking about? And if so, how on _earth_ could they reconcile such deep affection with such unbridled lust?  
It was unlikely, if not downright impossible. 

* * *

Luckily for me and for my opinion on mankind, the day after the Olympics began, I overheard a third conversation that lifted my spirits up a little and made me realize not everyone was like those three poor excuses for men.  
This time, it was a man and a woman; their accent was a little drawled, and I figured they weren’t native English speakers. They were leaning on the boards, overlooking the dimly lit rink.

“Ti dispiacerebbe se parlassimo in inglese? Ho bisogno di un po’ di tempo per riabituarmi.”  
“Certo che no.”  
“I’m glad we’re going to see them again,” she said.  
“We should hang out – I remember Scott telling me about how we should go for a wild beer night out.”  
“ _You_ and my husband are going for a wild beer night out with your buddies. _I_ ’m going to enjoy a much quieter night with the girls, thank you very much,” the woman raised her eyebrows at him. “And just so you know, Tessa threatened to kill him if he gets back as drunk as he was the last time you went out for drinks. _And_ she’ll have both your heads, along with Eric’s and Patrick Chan’s.”  
A horrified look crossed the man’s face. “Damn – she _is_ frightening. But I wouldn’t be so sure about her saying no to beer. She’s a true Canadian.”  
“She hasn’t gone for a beer with you guys since that time she had to practically break into a pharmacy at four in the morning to smuggle some ibuprofen because –”  
“Nobody asked her to –”  
“– _because_ ”, she carried on, “had all of you asked the doctors back at the NHK Village for it the next morning, it’d have been a dead giveaway of the fact you had been drinking.”  
“As if no one noticed anyway,” he muttered.  
“How could she know you and Scott would deem it _a-mus-ing_ to announce it to the entire Village through the loudspeakers?”  
“We thought they were turned _off_! It was the middle of the night – why would you leave the loudspeakers on in the middle of the night?” The man complained.  
“To allow us girls to make fun of a bunch of twenty-something, drunk-off-their-asses boys back from their crazy night out?” The woman laughed. “Let me tell you, the two of you opening up your hearts with no self-consciousness whatsoever and declaring your undying love to Eve and Tessa was _something_.”  
“I bet she gave him hell for that.”  
“She couldn’t stay mad at him for the life of her. And she didn’t give him hell.”  
He narrowed his eyes. “And how would you know that?”  
“Eavesdropping,” she shrugged.  
A mock-outraged look came upon his face. “Anna! You _didn’t_! They’re our _friends_!”  
“It wasn’t my fault!” The woman exclaimed, her voice rising a good half octave. “They weren’t exactly being _quiet_!” She abruptly stopped, eyes as big as sausages, as he raised his eyebrows suggestively. “I didn’t mean it like _that_! They were just _talking_. In the _hallway_. Get your head out of the gutters,” she smirked. “But you know Scott. He’s loud when he’s not drunk, you can only imagine how he gets when he is. She was half dragging, half walking him to his room, and he was singing –”

 _"You lift my heart up when – when the rest of me is down, T – how do you do it?”_  
_“Tons of patience, I guess,” Tessa muttered, even though he wasn’t actually waiting for a reply._  
_“What did you give me to make – make my heart beat out of my chest? You – gave something to me, T? Why didn’t you tell me, eh?” Scott shook his head, abruptly stopping and looking at her as if she had done something indefensible to him. “No,” he said as she tried to pull him along the hallway with her. “I’m not going with you until you – tell me what it is that you gave me.”_  
_Tessa rolled her eyes. Scott hadn’t gotten this drunk in ages; she had almost (_ almost _) forgotten these nonsensical conversations that would take place every time he did. She knew logic wouldn’t take them anywhere, but she was too tired to care. “I didn’t give you anything, Scott,” she tried to reason. “Except for some ibuprofen, so that you won’t wake up feeling like a wreck three hours from now. Okay, you don’t believe me,” she shrugged, seeing that he was shaking his head. “Then I can’t help you. Good night,” she said with finality, starting to walk to her room._  
_After perhaps ten steps, she felt his shaky legs move again (she mentally patted herself on the shoulder for her in-depth knowledge on the Scott subject) and his arms, heavier than usual, wrap around her waist from behind. He buried his face in her neck, his words coming out muffled and slurred but still intelligible. “Something in the way you move makes me – makes me feel like I can't live without you – god, I_ know _I can’t live without you, T,” he sighed, nuzzling her neck._  
_She smiled – her authentic, bright smile Scott was so fond of – in the semi-darkness of the hallway, her hands stroking the back of his with a tenderness she’d never admit to in the daylight. “I know – I can’t live without you either, you silly. Even when you’re so drunk I’ve got to come rescue you and drag you to the nearest bed. On that subject, Scotty –”_  
_“Don’t wanna,” he mumbled against her skin._  
_Well, that was odd. Scott usually went out like a light the moment he touched the pillow when he was that drunk. As she fished out the key to her room (it’d be easier to have him crash there than having to drag him all the way to his room, she decided), she felt a little bit concerned.“What? Why not?”_  
_“'Cause even when I dream – dream of you, the sweetest dream will never – do, I'd still miss you – babe, and I don't want to miss – miss a thing,” he drawled out. “Y’ know, T? I don’t wanna – miss a thing,” he breathed in her neck as she opened the door and let the two of them in, her body trembling with repressed laughter and something else, akin to exhilaration, as if a volcano of warmth were exploding within her chest._  
_(The part of her brain that never stopped buzzing and analyzing registered the first occurrence of the term “babe”.)_

“And after a while, I heard her sing _Dream A Little Dream Of Me_ ,” she concluded.  
“No _way_! Tessa doesn’t sing. Remember that time we tried to get her to sing karaoke?”  
“Believe what you will. But, her room was next to mine, and the walls were thin.”  
“Wow,” he said, amazed. “To him?”  
“Of _course_ to him! I don’t think she’d ever sing to anyone else.”  
“That’s _cuuute_! Who would’ve thought Tessa Virtue was such a teddy bear? Oh, I’m _so_ going to roast her,” he happily rubbed his hands. “Wait,” a suspicious look came upon his face. “He was _drunk_. So drunk he wouldn’t remember any of that.”  
“Exactly.”  
“You mean she did it – _because_ he wouldn’t remember? Ouch. That’s twisted. Still cute, but twisted.”  
“She’s _afraid_ , you know? She’s afraid he doesn’t actually think any of those sappy things he says to her when he’s drunk, and one day he’ll recall each and every one of them and backpedal. Badly.”  
“But – but he _always_ says sappy things to her! Even when he’s _sober_! Even when we’re having breakfast, and god knows he manages to tell her how beautiful and smart and talented she is two minutes into it! Over _poached eggs_!”  
“I know,” the woman agreed. “But she got burned once already, remember that Ryan guy? He used to tell her such romantic things –”  
“ _Only_ when he was drunk. Rest of the time he was the worst moron there ever was. Don’t know why it took her so long to see it,” he countered without missing a beat. “This is something else entirely. It’s like comparing two incomparable things,” he shook his head. “It’s a completely different level – this is _Scott_ we’re talking about. He’d hurt himself before he hurt her.”  
“I think she knows that deep within, but – maybe she’s so scared they’ll lose what they have now if she acknowledges what she really feels for him, that she thinks it’s better left alone?” She sighed. “I just hope they work this out soon. They’re so smitten with each other it’s ridiculous.”  
“Yeah.” He sighed too. “And I hope she lets him get wasted after we’ve done our fair share of competing. Poor man needs a let out once in a while. Needs to reconnect with his Canadian roots.”  
“ _Canadian roots_ , the new euphemism for _beer_.”  
“Like when you say _Italian roots_ –”  
“– and everyone thinks you’re talking about family and lasagne –”  
“– but you actually mean _wine_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The two lines in Italian:  
> "Would you mind if we used English? I need some time to get used to it again."  
> "Of course not."


End file.
